I spent three weeks last August walking the dry creek beds south of Alice Springs, following a ridgeline that the station hands called Old Man Spine. The ground was iron-red and cracked into tessellations that looked deliberate, almost architectural. My companion, a geologist who had worked the region for twenty years, pointed to a cluster of stones arranged in a shallow crescent. That has been there longer than any building in this country, she said. Nobody knows who placed them, but everyone knows not to move them.
The Earth Remembers What We Choose to Forget
On the maps we never learned to read, and the ground that holds every path we've abandoned